Warlords and politicians vie to lead Afghanistan

Afghanistan presidential election

A slew of senior politicians signed up on Sunday as candidates for Afghanistan's presidential election next year, where they will face off against warlords, tribal leaders and the incumbent leader's elder brother, in what could be the country's first democratic handover of power since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001.

Candidates filed papers for the contest just before Sunday's deadline, including former finance minister Ashraf Ghani, incumbent foreign Minister Zalmai Rassoul, and Qayum Karzai, the elder sibling of President Hamid Karzai.

Originally installed with the support of the US in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, masterminded by al-Qaeda from Afghan soil, Hamid Karzai is obliged is to step down after two terms, leaving an election contest with no clear front-runner.

His replacement will be chosen in the April 5 poll amid a continuing Taliban insurgency against the government and its Nato allies, which are steadily withdrawing their troops after a failed attempt to pacify the country.

Mr Karzai has not said who he plans to back in the forthcoming poll, a potentially important factor in the final outcome, although analysts say he is more likely to support Mr Rassoul, a regime loyalist, than his little-known brother.

Mr Ghani, a technocrat who heads a commission overseeing the transition to Afghan control of the nation's Nato-led security forces, said any candidate would need to grapple with the terms of a peace deal with Taliban militants.

"The Taliban are a fact of this country.... Reaching enduring peace means acknowledgment of those who are bearing arms and understanding the external support mechanisms and their internal grievances so we can address them," he told Al-Jazaeera.

Among those who declared their candidacy ahead of Sunday's deadline were Abdullah Abdullah, the former foreign minister who was runner-up to Mr Karzai in the 2009 poll, but pulled out in the final round on the grounds that there had been widespread ballot-rigging.

Mr Abdullah joined one-time defence minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, who registered to enter the race on Saturday.

Another influential candidate is Abdul Rab Rasoul Sayyaf, an Islamist scholar and jihadist who fought against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and had close ties with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

"It's a first for us," said Yama Torabi, executive director of Integrity Watch Afghanistan, an anti-corruption watchdog. "We are going to have a new president and this is someone we are going to see as a legitimate ruler."

After decades of civil war, it is Afghanistan's ethnic warlords rather than its political parties that play the key role in the country's politics. The western governments that will still have some 70,000 troops in Afghanistan during the elections are hoping that the polling is credible and that the eventual winner will garner support from all the country's main ethnic groups to reinforce Afghanistan's fragile national unity.

"The criterion is whether the people of Afghanistan accept the outcome," said one Kabul-based diplomat. "It's very important that Afghans think it's OK, and that the person who comes out on top should be their next president."

Although Taliban militants have not done much to disrupt continuing registration of voters among Afghanistan's 31m inhabitants, Taliban leaders say they oppose the elections and have proved reluctant to engage in peace talks with Mr Karzai's government or his US backers.

Four Nato coalition soldiers were killed during an operation in southern Afghanistan on Sunday highlighting the fragile state of security in the country.

"It will be questioned if it's not ethnically balanced," said Mr Torabi. He added, however, that violence spreading to other parts of Afghanistan was "tragically balancing the insecurity in the south"

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